Incurably Sceptical

In this section I rifle through the recent cognitive psychology literature and pick out a paper which looks interesting to me based on the abstract alone. I then proceed to examine the authors’ aims, methodology, analysis and interpretation. Hopefully along the way we will not only learn a little about the topic of the paper, but, in appraising it with a critical eye, perhaps also derive some lessons about the scientific method.

Importantly, these are not ‘bad’ papers. Indeed, unless papers I find interesting are more likely to be bad (maybe), they should be representative of the standard of papers being published in the main cognitive psychology journals at the moment.

thecomplexbrain.com - Is Agency Rewarding? Background This time we will be looking at a paper titled ‘I control therefore I do: Judgments of agency influence action selection’. The paper aimed to investigate whether a person’s feeling of agency over an effect made them more likely to engage in the behaviour which produced that effect – in

thecomplexbrain.com - Super Recognisers Background This time we will be looking at a paper entitled ‘Testing for Individual Differences in the Identification of Chemosignals for Fear and Happy: Phenotypic Super-Detectors, Detectors and Non-Detectors.’ [Link] Broadly, the aim of this paper was to examine the extent to which people can

thecomplexbrain.com - Clash of Civilisations The Player of Games I recently came across a paper called ‘Civilization differences in Chess Experts’ by Chassy and Gobet (2015) and my mind immediately recalled The Player of Games by the late Iain Banks. In the far distant future, Jernau Morat Gurgeh, one of the greatest game players in his

thecomplexbrain.com - That Facebook Paper Let’s do a test of selective memory. Do you remember ‘that Facebook study’ from a few years ago? It was really creepy and ethically dubious right? Do you remember what the study was actually about? No?